The numbers come first. A Wharton professor and a University of Texas at Austin communications professor studied roughly 760 employees at a multinational financial services company and found that remote work can weaken what they call 'relational capital' — knowing whom to ask for help, feeling comfortable asking, and getting a colleague to answer.
The paper, 'How Remote Work Is Reshaping the Office,' was published online in July in California Management Review. Peter Cappelli and Y. Jasmine Wu conducted 38 group interviews in late 2023 with employees in the U.S., the U.K., and India.
The core finding is simple: workers often said the work was getting done, but they usually meant their own assignments and key performance indicators, or KPIs. Helping a colleague or showing a new hire the ropes was easier to push aside, and those tasks had often depended on personal relationships rather than formal job requirements.
That mattered when people needed an answer fast. Sending a message was easy. Getting a response was another matter. The company encouraged employees to use Microsoft Teams, but some replied promptly while others put their own work first. Many defaulted to an 'If it’s the end of my day, I wait until morning' attitude.
The researchers found that familiarity still mattered. Employees who called colleagues they already knew got help quickly. Otherwise, help was more likely to be delayed. That created a negative loop: delayed responses made people less willing to reach out again, which eroded the relationship further.
New hires appeared to take the brunt of that problem. One relatively new hire with no work friends reported trying for three months to get an answer. Cappelli has flagged the issue before for entry-level workers, and the study argues that newcomers need more structured introductions to people beyond their own teams.
Virtual meetings did not solve the problem. Employees described larger online meetings where people kept cameras off and did other work, sometimes forcing follow-up meetings to cover what had been missed. Cappelli and co-author Ranya Nehmeh made a similar complaint in their book 'In Praise of the Office,' saying remote work is making the workday longer and more transactional.
There were some benefits. Some respondents saw less in-person interaction as a plus for women, minorities, and introverts. Working at home could also make it easier to concentrate, if a private space was available.
But the study also pointed to management choices that made hybrid work less effective. Starting in the pandemic, supervisors were told to focus on individual deliverables. The company also cut office space to save money, leaving too little room for everyone to come in on designated office days. Shared desks made it harder to sit near the same colleagues regularly, and attendance requirements were inconsistently enforced.
Cappelli and Wu said the interviews alone cannot prove working from home caused these problems, even if they believe it contributed. They also said a self-care norm that took hold during the pandemic may have played a role.
Their prescription is straightforward: coordinate office days so teams actually overlap, schedule collective activities, and make helping colleagues and mentoring new hires part of job descriptions and performance criteria. Promotion decisions, they added, should consider more than individual KPIs.
For companies, the lesson is not ideological. It is operational. Capital rewards clear rules, and teams run on more than deliverables alone. When firms treat collaboration as optional, the hidden cost shows up in slower answers, weaker mentoring, and a more transactional workday. The market has already voted on productivity; management still has to decide whether the office exists to save money or to make work actually work.
